


Moving Through Darkness

by beetle



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen, Post-Chosen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-20
Updated: 2013-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-12 10:55:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/810777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beetle/pseuds/beetle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His quarry is his only way out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moving Through Darkness

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I didn't create anything but the situation they're in.  
> Notes/Warnings/Spoilers: Darkfic, no spoilers.

These days, when it’s dark, it’s  _very dark_.  
  
Like midnight in Charlie Manson’s soul, this darkness just consumes light; swallows it down whole without letting any escape. It seems like there’s never any sun or moon, just a thick canopy warding out intruder light.  
  
He used to wonder how the trees didn’t starve.  
  
When the green-black lightens, he’s always the same, rising from a sleepless night to track the Hostile. The only lead in tracking has been the hearsay of the last locals he’d seen, who’d spoken a dialect he hadn’t bothered to learn. There’s also the faint, not-wrong sense he has of moving in the right direction.   
  
The Hostile moves south by southwest, deeper into the jungle than he’s ever been. It seems like months since he’s seen a city or any technology other than his gun. He knows it’s been at least that since the last of his men died.  
  
The usual spoor of eviscerated goats - and occasionally children - continues, gets thicker the closer he wends towards the mountains. Becomes usual, like all the uglinesses he’s seen of late. He’s numb to it, no longer wonders why the goats or the children were untended, what horrible things they did to warrant such violent deaths.  
  
There was a time when he’d cursed the God he’d been raised to adore, kneeling over a little girl’s mutilated corpse, her big, deep brown eyes unblinking, frightened. Dead. He’d cursed his God, buried her and moved on. He doesn’t think about any of these things anymore, except during the scant hours of weekly sleep. He no longer buries the bodies he finds. It costs too much valuable time.  
  
The dead girl could be said to blot out the most mundane memories, like cleanness, his favorite color and his middle name - or his first name, for that matter - if she weren’t the largest nonentity in his life at the moment, and the  _thing_  has managed to blot her out.   
  
He can’t remember what it feels like to be clean.   
  
He figures he’ll come upon the Hostile before what he estimates is noon, if he keeps this pace up. He’s too numb to be tired and long ago gave up on shoes of any kind. His feet are tough. He could walk forever and has already walked for nearly half that.  
  
The shaman at that last village, many weeks ago, had been willing to trade wards for his bright and shiny, military-grade compass. Her love of doodads had benefitted him in so many ways, as his need for wards had benefitted her. Both of them had obviously felt they’d gotten the better of the deal. The wards tattooed on his right brow, jugular, heart and feet had protected him on more than one occassion and from more than Hostiles. The shaman probably hasn't lost her bearing once since acquiring his compass.   
  
It's win-win, he supposes.  
  
Luckily, after all this time, he can tell south from any other direction fresh out of a dead sleep, something he hasn’t had in weeks, anyway. The compass was a useless weight, another thing that slowed him down, marked him as  _other_.  
  
Forever walking and he hasn’t reached the mountains. Neither has the Hostile. But he can feel the closeness of them in his soul; cool, stone, unmoving. If he dreams of an end at all, an end to the rainless humidity, to the olive-drab/camo-light under the trees, to the way the remains of his clothes dampen and cling like leeches - the end is in the mountains. Maybe if he can kill this thing at last -  _slay_  it - he’ll be allowed out into the sunshine again, into halls of rock.   
  
He could rest, there. In the mountains. His people are not the people of trees and shade and canopy. They are a people of open plains and wind and sun. A people of flat places. The mountains would be strange, and high, but in sun-kissed wind, those faults can be overlooked, forgiven.  
  
There!  
  
A splash of orange on the bark of that tree - either blood or urine. He’s never seen it bleed or urinate, so can’t tell. Isn’t touching the secretion to find out, either. How or why it’s suddenly leaving this spoor isn’t important. Not unless the reason is angrier and huger than the Hostile. But he can slay that monster after this one is put down. He has infinite time, he senses, even as time speeds up around him and the mountains draw closer. He could spend forever just walking and not get one day closer to the mountains. The Hostile is the key. When he has it -  
  
He picks up his pace unconsciously, breaking into a light jog, then a run. The branches that whip his face and arms receive no more notice than the dirt and muck squelching under his calloused feet. The wards protect the important parts of him. The dark of his shuttered eyes is only marginally darker than under the eternal canopy. He can see in this dark.   
  
He feels  _it_  ahead, waiting now. It knows he hunts it, and thinks to put an end to him.  
  
As the last of the branches fall away he opens his eyes. He’s in a clearing; a bald patch that looks razed and dead. Crouching and facing away from him is the monster. The Hostile.  
  
The form the Hostile wears is human. Long, pale, freckled from an inability to tan. It wears army-issue clothes, slightly ragged, but clean, properly tucked and buttoned. As if it’d just walked out of Basic Training, not a fucking rainforest.   
  
It’s this that enrages him, maybe even more than the dead brown eyes of the dead brown girl.  
  
He aims his gun, his last hold on all he used to be, all that he’s dropped by the wayside in his quest. It’s his Excalibur, his strength, and he holds it with all the conviction of a Viking hold his ax.  
  
“Kill me once, shame on me. Kill me twice, shame on you, Agent Finn.” The mocking tenor is unchanged. It’s the first English he’s heard spoken in eons.  _English_  English and isn’t that somehow unsurprising?  
  
“Face down on the ground, Hostile two-four-nine!” He’s aiming his gun, screaming hoarsely; the first words  _he’s_  spoken in weeks, the first English he’s spoken in millennia.  
  
“Is this how they raise young men in Iowa?” Hostile two-four-nine is standing, turning to face him, now. “You don’t even know why you’re here, do you?” The Hostile is facing him, all dark, longish hair streaked with white and eyes like holes in it’s white face. That grin is familiar, makes him slightly dizzy. Hostile two-four-nine steps closer, moving gracefully, his ethereality at war with the earthy fatigues.  
  
“My, but you  _have_  changed in the years since first we met. Love your new look. It’s very - primal.” The Hostile smiles charmingly, like the host of a dinner party. It’s still moving closer, slowly, relentlessly, features flickering like the twinkle of a far off star.  
  
“Do not - Hostile two-four-nine, I  _will_  kill you!” His hand is shaking badly. His vision trebles for a moment, the greens and browns leech out of the world, leaving only shades of grey.  
  
“Silly boy. You’ve already killed me once. Doing so  _twice_  would be, well - overkill.” That voice, so precise... always one, dry witticism away from outright laughter. The urge to put a bullet in that face is like an itch in his brain. “You can drop the pistol. You’ll find it’s quite useless, here.”  
  
He fires before the Hostile finishes speaking. The bullets, all six of them, hit the Hostile’s chest. The Hostile doesn’t slow down, only smiles deeper, eyes glittering in cold amusement.  
  
“Perhaps it’s the form I wear that disturbs you. Is this more to your liking?”  
  
He’s never heard a voice change so drastically, going from middle-aged Englishman to young American woman. Nor has he seen a humanoid form shift in similar fashion. Until now.  
  
“Better?” It’s still smiling and it’s eyes are still unwarmed by the smile. “You loved her so much. Didn’t stop you from putting a bullet in her, though, did it, loverboy?”  
  
And he’s falling to his knees, gun forgotten, disintegrating. It drifts to the forest floor as a shower of rust.  
  
“You’re dead. You can’t be here.” It’s a mantra, one that’s never worked, but he finds himself saying it anyway. He’s a long way from home, a long way from where he saw his first Hostile. He’s been lost a long, long time. He bows his head, shutting his eyes tightly. “Not supposed to be here.”  
  
“Ri... my poor Ri.”  _It’s_  hands are cool and clammy on his face. “You know how it is. We die, we come back. Then die again and come back again, if we’re the Slayer. Oh, you don’t even remember the Slayer, do you? Forgot her just like you forgot me and poor, dear Sam... like you forgot us all. So you could play the hero, making the rainforest safe for human kind.”  
  
“Buffy,” he says, recognizes the name in his gut, though his head only blanks out, filled with the same darkness that seems to surround him.  
  
“Would this be easier for you if I were?” The voice has changed yet again: still female, but bouncy, pouty, oh-so-Californian.   
  
“No!” His hands are around the Hostile’s throat as he tackles it to the ground, glaring into laughing dark eyes that are more than familiar. They’re  _remembered_. “Not her!”  
  
“Such a bundle of contradictions, Agent Finn. She’s the only one you haven’t killed, isn’t she? Forrest, Graham, Maggie, Samantha, and myself, of course. All dead by your hand or your actions, yet you fear  _her_  above us. Why is that, do you think?” Those cold dark eyes seem as unfazed by the strangling as by the bullets.  
  
“You’re dead.” Squeezing tighter. “Hostile two-four-nine: Rayne, Ethan. Executed, cremated, scattered in the Nevada desert.” Riley's mind is clearer, now. Clearer than it’s been in months. Where the hell is he? Where has he  _been_?  
  
“Better men than you’ll ever be have tried to kill me and failed, Agent Finn.” Hostile two-four-nine is no longer smiling. “In fact, after I’m done here, I’ll be paying a visit to one of those better men... a very old friend. Trust me on this, Riley, your private Hell is Shambala compared to what I have planned for  _him_.”  
  
A dizzying flash and their positions are reversed. Riley can feel the absence of every molecule of air blocked by Ethan Rayne’s long hands around his throat. His already feeble struggles taper off quickly as darkness eats away at the edges of his vision.  
  
“There, now. Everything's as it should be.” The sorcerer is grinning again. “I feel rather like a villain in a Bond movie: I’ve gloated long enough and I’ll leave you to get out of this or - not. Though I don’t imagine you will.” The hands on Riley’s throat loosen as Ethan Rayne leans down and kisses his forehead, just next to the shaman’s tattoo. Whispers something so softly, Riley’s still struggling to make out the words as his consciousness is extinguished -  
  
\- he’s running, under the canopy. Searching for -  _it_. The escaped Hostile. He’s tracked it so far, he can’t turn back. The only way out is through the beast, then through the mountains. His sense of the mountains is more distant than ever. He has all the time he’ll ever need to get to them, but his blood has quickened, the urge to be out of this dank, rotting greenery and in among the cool sterility of stones is eating at him like acid.   
  
He’s been in this place for years... another day won’t kill him.   
  
But he runs, nonetheless.

  
* * *

  
  
“Sir..? Sir, visiting hours are over, now. I’m afraid you’ll have to call it a night.” Nurse Bellows says quietly. Doesn’t know why she bothers; this is the vegetable wing, a little noise won’t disturb any of their patients, unfortunately.  
  
The tall, pale, well-dressed man glances up at her from his seat next to the poor, sleeping boy. She represses a shudder. Something about them both weirds her out.  
  
“Of course. It’s so seldom I’m out this way, I just thought it would be nice to pay my  _dear_ nephew a visit, see to his welfare.”   
  
“It’s good that he hasn’t been forgotten. That happens to so many of our patients, sadly.” Nurse Bellows is normally a chatty woman, but never in the presence of this man. He’d been to visit his nephew several times in the year since the boy was found comatose, but his accent still throws her for a loop. His  _oddness_.  
  
But Nurse Bellows is a professional, and she pulls on a professionally sad smile. ”Such a shame... fine young man like him. You’re the only one been to see him since he was found.”  
  
“I’m afraid I’m all the family he has,” the Uncle says softly, his tone vague, disinterested. “My business takes me abroad more often than I’d like, but - I try to see him as often as I can.”   
  
Nurse Bellows watches him stand and take his nephew’s hand. “You’ll always be in my thoughts, Riley. I will  _never_  forget; that I can promise you,” he whispers very softly, then leans down and kisses his nephew’s forehead just above his right eye. “Never.”  
  
Then he’s stepping past Nurse Bellows with a wistful smile that just doesn’t warm his eyes at all.


End file.
